Ptolemy the Gnostic

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Ptolemy was a Christian teacher of the second century, one of the leading figures of the Valentinian school of Gnostic thought, active probably at Rome in the decades around 160. Almost nothing of his life is recorded; he survives as a name attached to two bodies of teaching, one preserved by an admirer and one by an enemy.

The first is his own. The Letter to Flora, addressed to a Christian woman of that name, is quoted in full by the fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius and is among the few Valentinian writings to come down in the words of a named author rather than in hostile paraphrase. In it Ptolemy takes up a question that pressed on early Christians from every side: what to make of the Law of the Hebrew scriptures. He argues that it cannot all derive from one source. Part comes from God, though a God lower than the perfect Father; part from Moses; part from the elders of the people. Even the divine portion he divides again — pure commandment, law mixed with injustice that Christ abolished, and law that is figurative, its true meaning spiritual rather than literal. The letter is measured and pastoral in tone, an attempt to lead its reader by steps toward a fuller knowledge, and it has long struck scholars as evidence that Valentinian teaching could present itself as a refinement of ordinary Christian faith rather than a break from it.

The second body of teaching is a cosmology. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing his great refutation of the Gnostics around 180, sets out at length a system of thirty divine aeons emanating in pairs from an unknowable depth, the fall of the youngest of them, Sophia, and the troubled making of the lower world — and attributes this scheme to the followers of Ptolemy. How much of it is Ptolemy’s own and how much belongs to his pupils, or to Irenaeus’s arrangement of his sources, is a matter scholarship has never fully settled. The mythological elaboration of the system sits oddly beside the sober reasoning of the letter, and some have doubted that one mind produced both.

A further uncertainty surrounds the man himself. A Ptolemaeus appears in Justin Martyr as a Christian put to death at Rome under the prefect Urbicus, and a number of historians have proposed that this martyr and the teacher are the same person; the identification is plausible but cannot be proved. What can be said is narrower. In Ptolemy the Valentinian current is caught at the moment it reached toward system — toward a reading of scripture, of the cosmos, and of the distance between the true God and the maker of the world that its opponents found dangerous precisely because it was coherent.

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